Random thoughts on a variety of things but mainly on learning and teaching…

A thorny but interesting issue which has led to lots of discussion during our PD sessions at school. There have been some great videos recently and there are heaps of articles dealing with the umbrella term of “Digital Citizenship”. However, there are lots of discrete strands to this topic and they are often confused, melded, fused, and misrepresented. I don’t profess to know the difference between all these different terms – is there indeed any difference? I think there is, but I am not going to explore them right now…..

As well as the videos and articles there is also a plethora of resources to help teachers provide information to their students about keeping safe online. Netsafe‘s resources are already well used in schools and they also come in and present to students, teachers and parents.

The latest resources I have heard of are some provided by Microsoft (see Edudemic for more information). They look pretty good and I will certainly be exploring them a little further. The activities may need a little tweaking for an NZ audience.

Meanwhile this short video from Tedtalks states the case for being careful about our online behaviour.

After we watched this in our PD session the other day, we had a pretty robust and interesting discussion about the implications of what we do online and how others can see what we do. One of my colleagues sent this video to us the next morning which I think is even more graphic; it brings the whole issue to a level that anyone can understand, to a level that is tangible, and that we can all relate to.

This article asks us how big our digital shadow is, and this one looks at how companies can track our online behaviour. It links in neatly with this Tedtalk by Eli Pariser which talks about how what we are getting to see online is being filtered according to what we click on, according to our online activity.

Is Big Brother just watching us or is he controlling what we think, what we are allowed to think, what we can find out about? Do we have any privacy? Have we forfeited our personal space, our right to privacy through our desire to share, to show and tell, to annotate our lives with likes and updates and tweets? Our lives have changed – did we notice? Can we do anything about it? Plenty of food for thought……

“Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control and it didn't have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realised that you either became a power or you were crushed” Joe Strummer